Virtual disaster recovery to Azure Cloud

The Recovery Console lets you keep warm standby virtual images up-to-date in the Azure cloud. There is no Azure recovery target, but you can accomplish the task by installing the Recovery Console on a virtual machine in the Azure cloud and enabling the disaster recovery of your production systems into Hyper-V.

Please note: these steps are correct at the time of writing. However, Microsoft may change their process at any time, meaning these steps may become out of date.

Step 1: Create VM in Azure

1. Go to the Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com and sign in with your Microsoft account. You will need to create an account if you don't have one yet
2. Create an Azure subscription. If you do not have a suitable subscription yet afree 30-day trial is available
3. From the left menu, select Virtual machines
4. Then click Add and follow a setup wizard

   

The following settings must be configured:

1. Set the operating system to Windows Server 2016 Datacenter or Windows 10 Pro (they both support nested virtualization A feature that allows you to run Hyper-V inside of a Hyper-V virtual machine.)

   

2. For faster data transfer, select a location that is close to where the backup data is located

   

3. Choose a VM size that supports nested virtualization: Dv3 or Ev3

   For the full list of supported VM sizes, see this Microsoft article: Azure compute unit (ACU).

   

For further details, see the following Microsoft instruction: Create virtual machine

Step 2: Enable Hyper-V role

1. From the left menu, select Virtual machines
2. Start the virtual machine you created in Step 1
3. Establish a remote connection to the virtual machine (view Microsoft instructions)
4. Enable the Hyper-V role on the virtual machine (view Microsoft instructions)

Step 3: Enable virtual disaster recovery

1. Visit the Downloads page and download the Recovery Console installer
2. Run the installer and complete the installation
3. Enable Virtual Disaster Recovery to Hyper-V, being sure to meet all requirements before beginning for as many devices as necessary

Helpful settings:

• Keep the LocalSpeedVault disabled in this configuration since the recovery is "Cloud to Cloud"
• Location - this is where virtual machines will be created. You can use any path here, but typically it is C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V\Virtual Machine

Unless you uncheck the Continuous Restore setting, the restore will begin momentarily and will update the image with the changes every time a backup occurs for this system.